It's Raining Men!

I don't know why it didn't occur to me to write a post about male harem anime before. I don't know what I was thinking.

Okay, so male harem anime. Off the top of my head the top three that are coming to mind are Fruits Basket, Pretear and Haruka 8, Harukanaru (those last three words are all one title, sorry I don't know the translated title). Before I do anything, I'm going to talk about the definition of a 'harem' anime from my understanding, just to make everything clear.

A harem anime is when there are three or more people romantically inclined towards the protaganist. If there are two, then it's a love triangle, and if there is only one, then it's just a love story.

And today, I'm here to specifically write about male harem anime. I know there's a lot more female harem animes out there, where they pair a single guy up with like four or five chicks and they all like him - like in Ai Yori Aoishi, but I have no opinion on that sort of anime, so I acknowledge that it exists. Yeah, I don't really care.

When I was a little girl, I used to play Barbies with other little girls, and out of all my friends that I used to play with I was the only one with dark (nearly black) hair. So, we'd sit down to play and I didn't usually play with a blonde Barbie - I had a the brown haired one named Theresa (I think ... memory failing). Now, naturally, I wanted my doll to have a boyfriend and there was only Ken. But Ken is Barbie's boyfriend, so whenever we played, I'd always be stuck being 'the other woman' or the single friend. LAME! So, I'd give up on Barbies and we'd go play a make believe game where we reinacted The Last Unicorn, where I always got stuck being the harpy (no joke) or Molly. Of course, I always felt jipped because I wanted to be Amalthea. Right ripped. So, then we'd go play Little Lady Lovely Locks, Rainbow Bright, or Gem (in case you didn't know it, every single one of these is an example of blonde supremecy where the girls with other colours of hair are only side characters - Sailor Moon hadn't shown up yet to piss me off). So, I got a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about having dark hair, or more specifically about blonde girls always getting the men.

That's just one angle of my rage. The other angle of my rage is that there is no one else to choose besides the Ken doll. Who the hell wants Ken? The only answer I can think up is a girl who has no other options. As I recall, I didn't think Ken was interesting at all, and don't remember getting worked up over made up characters until they were more interesting then him. So, not only are there no guys, but the one guy who was around during these games was a loser. Tough luck!

So when I discovered ... a-hem, I mean - when I DISCOVERED male harem anime I was really pleased. Okay, so now our herione not only gets to have a boyfriend, but she can have several guys who love her intensely and look out for her like brothers (Fruits Basket), she can pick the one she wants (Pretear), or she can throw them all away and go for the bad guy (Haruka 8, Harukanaru). I actually don't know about that last one, I didn't get to see it to the end, but it seemed like things were going that way where I left off.

I don't feel like I'm being sick or anything, but in these animes, I feel like they give little girls (I'm sorry I haven't seen the ones geared towards really little girls - even though I know they exist) a chance to figure out what kind of guy they like since usually all the male characters are very different from each other.

And then ya know that I love anime because of the variety of hair colours all the characters have. The main girl is rarely blonde. Yeah, you'd think I wouldn't still be angst-ridden about that into my twenties, but when I was a small child I used to look at blondes and wonder if they thought the same as brunettes. Sometimes I even still remember the childish musing, long after I discovered the answer to it.

Wanna hear the answer?

Absolutely no one thinks like me.

P.S. Just as a side note, I'd like to say that I don't have it out for blondes. I just didn't like my culture deemed blonde as beautiful.